The Great Basin Observatory (GBO) is a cooperative effort of Great Basin National Park, the Great Basin National Park Foundation, and four partner universities: University of Nevada in Reno; Western Nevada College in Carson City; Southern Utah University in Cedar City; and Concordia University in Irvine. The GBO is a first-class research and educational observatory serving students, research teams, and science departments of smaller colleges and universities. Academic departments which cannot offer astronomy degrees because of a lack of research facilities will be able to utilize the GBO to add new research and educational opportunities for their students.

This particular project will allow the installation of the new Concordia-owned spectrograph at the GBO, which is located in a spectacular high altitude, low humidity, dark sky site in Great Basin National Park in Eastern Nevada. The GBO, which was dedicated in August of 2016, is the first astronomical research observatory to be located in a national park in the United States. Once the spectrograph is installed on the telescope, Concordia students and faculty will be able to make some of the world's first spectroscopic measurements of stars and star systems. The spectral profiles of stars are "fingerprints in light" that serve to identify the star and provide important clues about its behavior. The telescope and spectrograph can be operated remotely and robotically from the Concordia campus via the web or, for that matter, from any web-connected computer in the world!